Blog

After a protracted search, I received and accepted an offer of a summer internship at Amazon. I'd expected to spend the summer working at Amazon's main office in Seattle, but to my surprise, I was placed in Massachusetts! Specifically, in Cambridge: home to most of the Hamilton soundtrack, mean people who bully robots, and the main antagonists of Fallout 4!

This is actually my first time "truly" living by myself without the safety of being able to move back in with my parents. (My hometown is Livonia, MI, which is only half an hour's drive from downtown Ann Arbor; that made it easy to visit home, but it also made me more than a bit complacent.)

Today marks the completion of my first full week of living, learning, and ostensibly adulting on the lean, mean, altitudinally inconsistent streets of almost-Boston. They've been surprisingly kind to me, and I've been enjoying myself!

In no particular order, here are some things I’ve discovered and notable events from the past week!

U-M is preparing me for the real world

This turns out to be true on multiple levels. Learning how to write multithreaded programs in class at U-M is obviously handy when the company you’re interning at (Hi Amazon!) asks you to write multithreaded software. But the soft skills and "life lessons" emphasized in lectures also have merit.

EECS 280 "Programming and Introductory Data Structures,” a required course for compsci majors and one of the largest courses at the University, has a lecture on impostor syndrome near the end of the term. This lecture is a bit controversial: many students openly complain (on the course's forum and on the University’s meme page) that, because it's unrelated to actual programming, it's a waste of class time.

That attitude bothers me, not just because I personally support that lecture's inclusion in the curriculum, but because I think meeting "soft" ideas with generous credulity makes you a better person. It's been my experience that impostor syndrome—feeling like an island of mediocrity awash in an ocean of perfection—is a real presence in the lives of students and working graduates; having internalized that lesson, I think, pushes me to help my colleagues when they stumble.

Amazon publicly advertises a set of "leadership principles" that it expects of its employees, stating that leaders take ownership of their work, insist on high standards, are obsessed with customer satisfaction, and so on. I've heard people deride them as "corporate Kool-Aid" with no presence outside of marketing materials, but it's been my impression that my full-time coworkers actually take them to heart.

It's nice to work with people who value something beyond a paycheck—who strive to be good people in addition to being good engineers. Sounds familiar, right (Leaders and Best)?

Traveling by car

One major advantage of working in Boston/Cambridge over Seattle is its proximity: it's possible to drive there from Michigan, which let me bring much more luggage than I could bring on a plane.

If you zoom in on the backseat, you can see a 25 pound bag of sushi rice nestled behind the passenger seat.

Realizing that I’d brought too many things

As did Icarus, enamored of his wings, too close to the Sun I flew, for my Boston apartment is very small.

On the bright side, having brought a portable air conditioner the size of a pregnant goat does make the Boston summer much more bearable.

Cambridge is very amenable to cyclists

As one would expect of an affluent urban center home to several major universities, Cambridge is a very bike-friendly city.

I brought my bike with me, intending to ride it to work. The trip takes 15 minutes going one way, which is quite reasonable for a morning commute!

Realizing that biking is hard

I walked my bike back from New Hire Orientation on Monday because my legs hurt from biking to New Hire Orientation and also sitting on the bike seat hurt my pelvis.

Yes, it is embarrassing that it took me less than 24 hours to give up on cycling in favor of Ubering to work. But that is not one tenth as embarrassing as walking my bike back on that first day and getting passed on the sidewalk by joggers and people walking with and without bikes.

Not getting as much blog material from Amazon as I'd hoped

This isn't to say that working at Amazon has been boring — it’s been an absolute joy — but Amazon's non-disclosure policies are much stricter than I expected. For instance, I can't really take selfies in the office, since the selfie might capture (for instance) a whiteboard in the background with a new product idea, which is (obviously) confidential, and would (also obviously) get me Hella Fired if I were to post it onto the front page of the Admissions Blog. I also can't discuss my internship project for similar reasons.

That said, I did take a few pictures that pass corporate muster!

Here's where I get my coffee each day:

And here's me applying a band-aid after scraping my knuckle in a revolving door!

(I should also mention: Amazon asks that I include a disclaimer in social media postings stating that all opinions are my own and not those of Amazon or its affiliates. That policy explicitly mentions blog posts, hence this little blurb here.)

(I have opinions, and they are mine and mine alone!)

Other experiences during my first week

A baby parking ticket, fallen from its nest.

I improvise chopsticks from butter knives.

I saw sailboats on the Charles River.